Wind turbines rely on wind turbine blades to extract energy from the wind to generate electrical power. In the current state of the art larger blades on the order of fifty meters or more are being used in order to extract more energy. These blades are often manufactured at a facility and transported to a wind farm for final assembly into a wind turbine. The size, and in particular, the length of the blades poses logistical problems during the transportation step due to limitations of the transportation infrastructure, including roadways, bridges, and in particular railway etc.
Industry has proposed various solutions to alleviate the transportation problems, including fabricating the blades in multiple pieces. These pieces may be assembled together at the wind farm to form the blade, usually by joining rigid components using fasteners such as bolts and optionally applying an adhesive. However, the blades formed using these methods still include bolted joints and these bolted joints may not endure as well as a cast blade would. One recently proposed blade assembly technique proposes manufacturing multiple blade segments where each blade segment is to have fiber reinforcement partially infused with thermoset resin (whose contour matches a shape of a respective portion of the blade) and an uninfused, loose-weave portion of the fiber reinforcement. The segments are transported to a remote location where the uninfused portion of the fiber reinforcement of one segment can be joined with an uninfused portion of the fiber reinforcement of an adjacent segment in an in-situ casting operation to form a monolithic blade.
While conventional manufacturing techniques are capable of forming these segments, there is a wide variety of ways these segments can be manufactured and each faces its own precision and tolerance control problems. Consequently, there is room in the art for improvement.